Delving into the spatial revolution ushered in by aviation in the early twentieth century, this conference aims to explore the aesthetic and political implications of aerial vision, and to analyse how various aerial technologies - from airplanes to satellites, from spacecraft to drones and digital mapping systems such as Google Earth and Google Maps - have influenced urban planning, architecture and land management, transforming the way we perceive and understand the underlying world we live in through its images.
Since the advent of the airplane, aerial technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous tools for the control, management and manipulation of space and population. In warfare, the destructive capabilities of aviation have increased enormously, thanks in part to the use of drones and new satellite imaging systems, whose images have changed not only the way we fight and identify the enemy, but also the way we manage military and territorial security. In civilian life, satellites scan the Earth's surface, extracting data and transforming it into information that reshapes spatial orientation, allowing observation, analysis and monitoring of space on previously unimaginable scales.
The various technological transformations of verticality have had a significant impact on the way we construct and think about the environment and society. On the other hand, the development of aerial technology has gradually changed our understanding of geographical and geopolitical dynamics, producing a scientific, rational and calculable space. A phenomenon that extends to the various forms of remote viewing, which redefine the very concept of distance and thus our relationship to the earth as a surface to be visualized and represented.
How do the images produced by aerial technologies shape our understanding of space, environment and territory? And how do these transformations influence political action? How are aerial images and technologies agents of subjectivation? What kind of urban subjects does aerial vision produce? What are the political imaginaries and epistemic frameworks they convey? What is their claim to truth? And how have concepts of distance and legibility, or the notion of scale, changed since the conquest of the air? What political considerations arise from the use of aerial technologies in public space? How does the dialectic between sky and earth, the view from above and the view from below change according to the aerial technologies used? What does it mean to be observed from above? And what strategies of resistance (political or artistic) have been mobilized to escape this regime of hypervisibility? What are the technical operations associated with this new scopic regime?
This conference will address these questions by bringing together contributions from different fields of research (aesthetics, political philosophy, media studies, urban studies, visual culture, architecture...) in order to develop a phenomenology of the aerial forms of contemporary power.